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What's better than one Starship? You guessed it: two of them.
By next year, we may get to see a pair of the world's largest spacecraft work in tandem in a spectacular attempt to refuel one of them in orbit, serving as a crucial milestone towards demonstrating that Starship is capable of carrying out NASA's Artemis III mission, which will see humans return to the lunar surface for the first time in over fifty years.
Spotted by TechCrunch, the timeline for the anticipated test was revealed in a Spaceflight Now interview with deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program Kent Chojnacki.
According to Chojnacki, the watershed test, which will span several weeks, is scheduled to begin March 2025, and will wrap up that summer — although there have been no official announcements on this from either NASA or SpaceX.
Longshot, Chaser
The refueling plan is ambitious. First, SpaceX will launch two Starships to low Earth orbit three to four weeks apart.
Parked above our planet, the initial spacecraft will need to be gassed up for the demonstration's purposes, and will patiently hunker down.
Weeks later, the second "chaser" rocket will fly up for a rendezvous with its companion, after which the two Starships will dock with each other. Then the latecomer will transfer propellant to the first rocket, and once it's topped it off, undock. From there, both will deorbit.
This would mark the first time that ship-to-ship propellant transfer is demonstrated at this scale, according to Chojnacki.
"And once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," he said in the interview. "If you can have a Starship with propellant aggregation, that's going to be the next step to doing an uncrewed demonstration."
Relight the Way
In the long term, the goal is that a variant of Starship called the Human Landing System will serve as the lunar lander that will bring NASA astronauts down to the surface of the Moon.
Certainly, SpaceX's progress with the rocket of late has been promising. Its most recent, fifth orbital flight test saw Starship pull off a ridiculously impressive landing by guiding itself into the mechanical arms of its launch tower dubbed "Mechazilla," which caught the rocket midair.
That proved that Starship was well on its way to being the reusable launch platform as promised. Next up, SpaceX plans to demonstrate that the vehicle's upper stage, the Starship itself, can relight one of its rocket engines in space — which will be essential for the spacecraft to perform controlled reentries into the Earth's atmosphere in the future.
According to SpaceX, that could come as soon as November 18. Keep your eyes peeled.
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